CBS SUNDAY MORNING SHOW - UFO’S
IN ADVANCE OF the much-anticipated feature on UAPs on CBS’s 60 Minutes show on 16th May 2021, the Sunday Morning Show ran a nine-minute long piece which included interviews with journalist and author Leslie Kean, former Harvard professor Avi Loeb and SETI Director, Seth Shostak. For those of you who didn’t manage to catch it, here’s a quick run-down:
“For decades, UFOs have been the stuff of science fiction. Could they also possibly be the stuff of reality? Our David Pogue is in hot pursuit of an answer.”
After a few clips from movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the appalling re-make) and a brief clip of the cantina scene from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, reporter David Pogue ran through the numbers, expressing the mathematical likelihood of the existence of aliens. And then the piece went downhill. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was wheeled on to provide the sceptical view from the get-go. His words were catnip for debunkers and caused eyes to roll all over the UFO/UAP community. After admitting that UFOs obviously exist because something you can’t identify must therefore be an unidentified flying object, he trotted out his usual spiel.
“But the real issue here is not that you see things in the sky, it’s what you claim they might be. You can’t just assume if you see something in the sky that looks weird, that it’s some kind of alien thing which is what a lot of people assume.”
Screen grab of Seth Shostak, SETI, speaking with David Pogue on CBS Sunday Morning show.
In essence, Shostak was saying that if it is unidentified, we’re jumping to the conclusion that it’s obviously alien. No, Seth, people like us are not saying that at all. We’re suggesting that because we don’t know what it is, we’d like it to be investigated, and properly. Amass more data, stronger evidence, and then reach a conclusion based on as much information as possible. We go where the data takes us, and that covers a wide spectrum of possibilities from everyday objects such as balloons, drones and aircraft, through to alien spacecraft, and all of the possibilities in between. We’re not afraid to accept the answer if it turns out to be mundane, or US tech, or that of a foreign adversary, but we’re tired of being fobbed off by the usual “explanations” from people who clearly haven’t looked much beyond the headlines.
Thankfully, journalist and author Leslie Kean was on hand to bring a sense of perspective to the proceedings, whilst not sitting at the other extreme of the debate. She recognised that the majority of sightings involve something mundane, which may not be immediately obvious to witnesses – Venus, comets, shooting stars, birds, account for around 90 to 95% of the cases, but stressed that left a significant number that defied explanation.
“Let’s say five to ten per cent are the cases that any conventional explanation can be ruled out. Those are the cases that are of interest.”
Screen grab of Leslie Kean, speaking with David Pogue on CBS Sunday Morning show.
Kean confirmed that since the publication of Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program (co-authored with Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper) in The New York Times in December 2017, there had been a “sea change” of attitude by the US Government towards the UFO topic. Pogue mentioned that in a CBS poll, two-thirds of Americans believed that there was intelligent life on other planets, ten per cent higher than in 2017 when The New York Times article came out. Mention of the three videos, and particularly the infamous “Gimbal” footage from 2015, led Kean to suggest that no-one in authority was any the wiser about what was being encountered.
“I think it’s very clear that the Navy and the Department of Defense have not been able to explain what this thing was, with all the work they’ve done on it.”
The footage that Jeremy Corbell released a couple of weeks ago that was shot by personnel onboard the Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Russell (DDG-59) whilst on deployment in July 2019 was also shown. What was missing, perhaps because this segment had been filmed prior to its release, was the latest imagery of a perplexing object from the Littoral Combat Ship USS Omaha (LCS-12), taken either on the same day or within a few days of the video shot from Russell. David Pogue attempted to obtain an interview with a spokesperson from the Pentagon, but his request was declined. Instead, they (Susan Gough?) issued a statement, which read (in part) as follows:
“The Department of Defense takes any incursions by unauthorized aircraft very seriously and examines each report. As we collect additional data, we expect to close the gap between the identified and unidentified to avoid possible strategic surprise.” – Pentagon spokesperson
Leslie Kean confirmed that “the biggest question” has always been whether or not these unidentified craft are Chinese or Russian, as if these are their technology, then America would be in trouble due to the obvious leap in technology the unknown objects clearly demonstrate. Rather than explore this further, the CBS reporter asked Kean to say whether there had ever been a “confirmed extra-terrestrial ship”, as he had never met someone who had access to as much information, reports and photographs as she did. To her credit, Leslie Kean gave a straight reply – one which in the absence of more details, can be the only one at present, but seemed confined to the “Gimbal” craft that she had commented on earlier in the segment.
“We’d have to say no, we’d have to say what’s confirmed is that we don’t know what this, let’s call it a ship or an object, we don’t know what it is. We can just say what it isn’t.”
Pogue went onto describe “another 2017 surprise”, this time the discovery of the first interstellar object ever to be detected in the Solar System, 1l/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua. The mysterious object had only been discovered once it was heading back out of the Solar System. Theoretical physicist Avi Loeb was interviewed about the object and what it may have been. Loeb of course caused something of a stir among the scientific community when he suggested it might have been an artificially thin “solar sail”, part of a probe sent from beyond the Solar System itself. ‘Oumuamua was thin, had no cometary “tail” and seemed to be “pushed” away from the sun. Loeb explained what the latter finding may have meant:
“And in order for that to happen, the object had to be very thin, sort of like a sail, reflecting light, instead of reflecting the wind as you find on a sailboat. (…) So we suggested that perhaps this object is a technological relic, in fact the sail produced by another civilization.”
Screen grab of Avi Loeb, speaking with David Pogue on CBS Sunday Morning show.
Of course, in the interests on balance, it wasn’t too difficult to find scientists that disagreed with Loeb’s suggestion. A clip of one saying that she was “a little pissed off when you throw the entire scientific culture under the bus”, when she and colleagues were looking at ways of building instruments to look for anomalies was first up, and then Shostak popped up again for more shtick. It was no surprise that he was not swayed by Avi Loeb’s theory, but his next reason came right out of the “swamp gas” playbook. Flying saucers do not appear on satellite imagery, ergo they don’t exist.
“Think about the fact that there are 750 or so satellites up there, you know, whirling around the Earth, making those photos you find on Google Earth. Don’t you think they would have found some of these saucers if they were really around?” – Seth Shostak, SETI
Pogue did tell Shostak, who makes a living from searching for evidence of ET through his work at SETI, whose mission is supposed to be to find it, that he sounded like a sceptic. No? Really? Shostak glossed over the irony by saying he had no doubt in extra-terrestrial intelligence, but it was “a different thing” to say that it had ever visited Earth. Kean, Loeb and Shostak did all however agree on the need for the US Government and the scientific community should spend more effort and funding on the search for alien life. What the segment did not get into was how that work and cash should be allocated. Those opposed to Shostak’s views would probably suggest he was looking for more funding for SETI. Loeb believed it should be a more “mainstream” activity, like archaeology. The CBS segment wound things up with a quick mention of the forthcoming report from the UAP Task Force which was requested by Congress. However, any thoughts that this might provide more information, a springboard to further investigation or even disclosure was poo-poohed by Shostak, who was given the final word on the subject:
“I mean the aliens, if they are here, they don’t do much, right? They don’t address the national debt, they don’t cure any disease, or do anything except occasionally appear to people in their cell phones.”
One hopes the 60 Minutes segment will provide a much more balanced piece, and if a debunker is needed for “balance”, someone is found that does not simply shrug off the possibilities without doing much in the way of research before spouting off. We can always hope – and if we didn’t hope, we wouldn’t have lasted this long in the UFO game, now would we?
You can view the whole segment via the CBS YouTube channel below.
